Les Grands Chantiers (Wattys 2022)

26. Boom (II)

They just made the train. Outside, the warm lights of the Wythaven skyline pierced the darkness. They looked at their reflections in the train windows, angled oddly. In the distance sirens blared as emergency services rushed to the explosion. 

Brendan breathed a sigh of momentary relief. They could relax for a moment. They had run from the factory. Luckily the streets had been deserted and they had drawn little attention, and the night before he had studied some of Wythaven's bus routes as a sort of half-hearted contingency plan, not very closely, but he had memorised that the 79 ran near the industrial estate, roughly parallelled the coast, and that it crossed line 3 at some point.

Wythaven Line 3 trains were automated, and Brendan could feel the brutal acceleration and deceleration curves of the ATO. He was grateful for it. It was getting them to their destination faster.

The glowing station canopy of Mendelssohn surrounded them. A few people got off. It was the tail end of peak hour in Wythaven. Looking all the way down the train, just a long corridor bathed in clinical white light, Brendan could see there were only a few people left. They were only three stations away from the end of the line.

Are we going to make it?" Adrian looked at their semi-opaque reflection on the darkened window of the train. "Can you do a go-faster spell or something?"

Go faster spell? Don't be ridiculous." Brendan eyed someone with a bike at the far end of the carriage. "On a freeway, maybe. On a regional line that runs one train an hour, maybe. On an automated train line that runs 36 trains an hour in each direction... you are going to kill people. A lot of people. That's not to say that people haven't tried. Every now and then someone in the Wythaven Metro operations centre would contact us and try to get us to squeeze more out of the signals. They made a full blown proposal, with documents and everything. They'd try and get us to get in the train cab- crouching down so nobody could see us, of course, and jam the in-cab transponder so that the train behind us would think that we were further away from them than we really were. Just really risky stuff. Beidzner originally wanted to do it, but when I explained just how dangerous it was he pulled out. He, of all people. Dude doesn't believe in OH&S but he pulled out because of this. It would have been a very lucrative contract for the school. They couldn't really understand why we said no. The school people, that is."

There were only a few more stations. Weldon. East Ilfracombe. And then the train terminated at Ilfracombe. They followed the few straggling commuters out of the harshly lit concourse and into the carpark, where they bundled into waiting cars.

They half-walked, half-ran the short distance from the station along the deserted main street to the shore, following the smell of the sea, breaking out into a full sprint as they hit the sand. The beach was deserted. The waves lapped angrily at their feet, the freezing foam wash wetting their shoes. The wind was cold across their cheeks, angry, harsh with the inflection of salt, lashing them with frigid spray. In the distance, the glass towers in the centre of Wythaven were still brightly lit.

They did not know the exact location of the cave, so they were operating on blind logic again. He scanned the craggy sandstone in the moonlight, looking for a crevice large enough to crawl through, to walk through.

Complicating matters was the narrowing ribbon of sand they were walking on, which petered out altogether into a thin ledge of rock at the cliff's edge.

Dusk had almost completely fallen, and Brendan could barely see where he was going. His feet were soaked. He paused for a moment to gather his bearings and figure out a plan.

Putting one foot onto the ledge, Brendan tried not to slip on the barnacles. The rocks were treacherous, wet with the continued breaking of the waves that lapped mere centimetres from his feet. He tried not to imagine what would happen if he lost his balance.